The empty house stood dark and ragged-looking in the end lot. The yard angled away on either side to form a truncated wedge, like a piece of pie with the house in the center and the point nibbled away by the sidewalk. The houses on either side were lit with yellow porch lights and haphazardly carved Jack o’ Lanterns grimacing wickedly along the walkways. But the house at the end seemed to swallow, not reflect, the light. In spite of the brightness and the activity along the rest of Oleander, it remained aloof, distant, coldly unaffected.
Kyle stood in front of the house and looked at it. The two windows visible from that angle stared blankly and blackly at him.
Eyes, Kyle thought, unaware of how stereotyped the image was. Eyes glaring at me, waiting to open, wanting to open and get me. He shivered.
“Hey, Brady,” he began, but just then a troupe of clowns and fairy princesses cut from the house on the left across to the house on the right. Kyle noticed that the kids avoided the dark stretch of sidewalk in front of 1066 and dashed straight across the road instead. As they passed a dozen feet away, silhouetted by the house lights from below, Brady grabbed Kyle’s arm and pulled him into the shadow of a huge tree on the corner of the lot.
From there, the house looked even worse, more sinister. It swelled up at the crest of the hill, seeming to grow larger and larger as Kyle stared at it. A long, white car stood in the driveway, a ghostly hearse waiting patiently for whatever haunted inside the house.
“Come on,” Brady whispered. “The coast is clear.”
Kyle risked a quick glance down the street. Amazingly enough, Brady was right. There wasn’t a kid in sight for three or four houses on either side. The group that had just crossed Oleander was hidden behind the swelling bulk of a garage, and even though Kyle could clearly hear their happy laughter and the ringing echoes of “Trick-or-Treat,” he couldn’t see them.
“Now’s our chance,” Brady said. He slipped from the shadow of the tree, crossed the weed-infested yard, and crouched by the darkened left headlight of the long, white car.
“Hurry.”
Kyle hurried. Bent over as if he were running against a strong headwind, he followed Brady’s trail until he too crouched on one knee in front of the car. The silvery-gleaming grill loomed over his shoulder like a tooth-filled mouth, and Kyle suddenly wanted to join the clowns and the fairy princesses and hold his pillowcase out for packets of Milk Duds and maybe even some of those little Mars bars that he considered the ultimate pay-off of the evening. But Brady was moving again, running low, dodging invisible shadows and phantom enemies as he skirted the corner of the garage and disappeared. Kyle swallowed hard and followed. He was running so hard as he rounded the garage that he almost rammed into Brady.
“Look,” Brady whispered, his finger pointing toward the side of the house. In the faint light, his skin seemed dead-white, his finger more bone than flesh. The mummy wrappings seemed distressingly real, and even the rank smell of old ketchup seemed to have disappeared, replaced by something heavier and hotter and darker.
Kyle looked.
The side garage door hung open.
“Cool,” Brady said. “Come on.”
“Hey…uh, I mean…”
Brady turned and looked coldly at Kyle. “Chickenshit?”
“Uh, no, I…” But there was nothing to say. Brady shook his head. The message was clear. Come with me and be my friend, or stay out here in the dark and you’re on your own.
Kyle wasn’t too familiar with the term blackmail, but at that moment he understood the panic and terror of its victims. Brady was blackmailing him. At stake was a lifetime’s friendship. He didn’t want to go into that house. He would have been willing to do almost anything rather than go into that house. Go to bed at six o’clock for a month straight. Eat lima beans and spinach. Study his spelling words for hours on end. Do dishes. Wash windows. Clean toilet bowls.
Anything.
But given the way Brady was acting, given the stakes Brady had established, Kyle had no choice. He followed Brady into the darkness.